I've no idea why I hadn't read--nor, considering the fact I went to
a predominantly Jewish High School, why someone hadn't required me to read--Anne
Frank's great memoir, Diary of a Young Girl. I suppose it
just seemed like it would be too depressing. Our school had left
little to the imagination; in 9th grade we saw films of the liberated death
camps--the horribly emaciated survivors, the gruesome piles of corpses,
the piles of hair and eye glasses, the showers, the ovens... They
made damn sure we knew exactly what went on in Nazi Germany.

In the years since, I've read plenty of books on the Holocaust.
I've seen the requisite movies and mini-series and documentaries.
What is it then about Anne Frank's story that filled me with such dread?
In retrospect, it's easy to figure out. The telling of the story
of the Holocaust so often seems to start and end with the six million dead.
It is a horror so massive that even after all the books and movies it is
just too awesome to comprehend. The sheer size and criminal audacity
of the slaughter somehow makes it seem unreal.

The story of Anne Frank, on the other hand, begins with a teenage girl,
her family and some friends hiding in an attic. The Holocaust, though
it's menace is omnipresent, is far in the background. It is this
girl who is real, her experience immediate. And it ends abruptly,
on August 4, 1944, without Nazis, without death camps, without dogs, without
barbed wire, without gas chambers. The diary just ends. Yet,
somehow, this only serves to make the story all the more powerful.
Consider only what is between the covers. At the end of the
book, here is all you know : this perfectly normal, perhaps even gifted,
teenage girl was killed for no other reason than that she was Jewish.
In the most affecting passages of the book, she herself futilely tries
to understand how her lightly held Jewish beliefs can have led to this
dire circumstance. No one reading the diary could ever perceive her
as any kind of threat. It is just not possible to imagine that she
is evil. Take only the best known passage from the diary:

It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all ideals,
because they seem so absurd and impossible to
carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of
everything I still believe that people are really good
at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a
foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and
death. I see the world gradually being turned into
a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder,
which will destroy us too, I can feel the suffering
of millions, and yet, if I look up into the heavens,
I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty,
too, will end, and that peace and tranquillity will
reign again.

What conceivable purpose could ever be served by destroying the child
who wrote those impossibly idealistic words? And so, the Holocaust,
which is so hard to wrap your mind around when you consider the six million,
becomes real and personal and all the more horrific when we consider just
one of it's victims. By it's very specificity the book takes on universal
qualities.

Of course, this is the reaction this book has provoked since the day
it was published, or at least one of the reactions. The question
of whether it is the only or the most justifiable reaction led to a truly
bizarre and tragic coda to the story, which Lawrence Graver relates in
the terrific book, An Obsession with Anne Frank. Meyer Levin
was a moderately successful mid-Century novelist (perhaps best known now
for Compulsion,
a novelization of the Leopold and Loeb murder case) . Though raised
in Chicago, he was a dedicated Zionist and, despite or because of feelings
of persecution and inferiority, was fiercely proud of his Jewish heritage,
a descendant of shtetl Jews from Eastern Europe. As World War II
wound down, working as both a journalist and a filmmaker, he documented
some of the first survivors stories of the death camps. He grew certain
that this was to be his mission in life: to present to the world the story
of the fate of Europe's Jews. So when he first read the Diary,
he recognized that here was the ideal medium through which to reach a mass
audience.

He established contact with Anne Frank's father, Otto, who had survived
the War and been responsible for publication of the original expurgated
diary. Levin was helpful, he claimed instrumental, in getting the
book published in America and even hoodwinked the New York Times into letting
him write their review--which was naturally a glowing review, running some
5000 words. In exchange, Frank gave him the right to take the first
crack at adapting the book for the stage. Here's where the trouble
began.

Otto Frank was a cosmopolitan, Europeanized Jew. He envisioned
the Diary as a universal text. Levin, on the other hand, was interested
in it specifically as it related to the Jewish Holocaust experience.
So Levin produced a draft which was considered a good start and stageable,
but it was by no means up to the quality of the big money treatment the
show was going to get. After much wrangling, Frances Goodrich and
Albert Hackett, non-Jews best known for their It's a Wonderful Life
script, were brought in and it was they who wrote the familiar version
which was first staged in 1955. Levin was enraged by what he saw
as an attempt to freeze him out, to even further reduce the Jewish elements
of the story and by what he came to believe was an actual conspiracy to
achieve these goals, a conspiracy in which he eventually included everyone
from Lillian Hellman to Otto Frank himself. Eventually he filed several
law suits and even sued Otto Frank. The whole matter became an obsession
which consumed the remaining quarter century of his life, estranged him
from friends and unsettled his family.

This story is fascinating on it's own, but read in conjunction with
the
Diary, it raises really interesting questions about how the
story should be understood. Is it in fact a good thing that the story
is so universal, or should it really put more emphasis on the Holocaust
as a unique event and a fundamentally Jewish experience? Must these
events be understood as a function of a particular time and place or are
they part of a larger human pattern? What is the meaning of Anne
Frank's life and her too early death? And who gets to decide these
questions, her father and family or the larger community of Jews or the
reader himself?

This book adds a definite texture and nuance to the story, but the Diary
certainly stands on it's own as a great work of literature and a vital
document of one of history's darkest chapters. It is all the more
remarkable for having been written by a teenager under such oppressive
circumstances.